New Card

Good Sunday morning!  I am excited, because I am trying something new this week.  I think I am finally ready to go a little more "public" with my cards, so have been thinking of ways I might do that.  I already listed one card in my Etsy shop- this one, and what's really exciting (for me, anyway) is that someone favorited it!  I eventually would like to work up to listing more cards, but I have to make some first, of course.  Always on the lookout for new inspiration, I spent some time this weekend surfing the 'net looking for card sketch sites.  I already check out MojoMonday on a regular basis, and wondered if there are more like it out there.  There are!  I found this one- CardPatterns, and enjoyed checking out the sketches there so much, that I decided to try out their sketch for this week.  There are birthdays coming up for several family and friends, so this is great timing- I plan to send this one to my sister-in-law, whose birthday is in the first week of October.

So, here's the sketch:

And here is my take on it:

I printed out the sentiments on the computer, and punched them with a 1" circle punch. Ideally, I would have loved to have stamped and embossed these, but since the "Happy" and "Birthday" are on separate pieces, it didn't work out that way- all of my Happy Birthday stamps have the whole phrase together.  The flowers are punched from a MS 4-petal flower punch, and the leaves are also a MS punch.  I used one of my favorite papers on this one, because it has so many nice color shades to work with.

So, now I just have to upload a link to this blog post to their site, and it will be out there for everyone to see!  I hope my work is up to par with the rest of the submissions!  I will look forward to future sketches from this blog.  What's nice about it is that the sketches are posted on Saturdays, so that gives me the weekend to work on something.

Also this week, I started testing the waters of teams on Etsy...I have resisted thus far, but decided it might be advantageous to be able to chat with other shop owners with similar interests.  I applied, and was accepted to, the Flowers and Romance Lovers team, as well as the Card Crafters of Etsy and The Oregon Etsy Team.  I have applied to two others, but have not been accepted yet. :(  Hopefully it is just that they are not very active (they don't seem to be), and not that they don't like my shop!  Oh, and I also joined the Etsy Garage Sale team, which is where shop owners can post advertisements of sales.  In addition to joining some teams, I also got a Twitter account!  I have no idea what I will do with it, but I decided to finally see what it's all about.  I have not yet figured out how to get that little thingie that says "Follow me on Twitter" on my blog, but if you DO want to follow me, I think you can probably search for me on Twitter- just look for bgardencreation (no "s" on the end, as I guess that exceeded the character limit).

I have a few ideas for some other cards I would like to make for my shop, and I am going to try to work on those today.  I might be back to share that stuff later.  Also in my plans for the near future is making a card for my BFF Kendra, whose birthday is in a couple of weeks.  She's leaving on vacation on her birthday, so I don't know if I will have something finished and mailed by the time she leaves, but if not, it will be waiting for her when she gets back from Hawaii, all tan and rested!